Ask HN: What are the best resources to properly learn Scala?

Re:Ask HN: What are the best resources to properly learn Scala? by noelwelsh on Monday March 27, 2017 @05:29AM (#13966203)

I'm the author of a couple of books on Scala: Essential Scala and Advanced Scala. You can find them here: http://underscore.io/books/

Depending on what your background and what you want to learn, different books will be appropriate:

- Our books are focused on what we consider the most important concepts for functional programming and how they are implemented in Scala. If you want to know about algebraic data types, type classes, and so on, and how to implement them in Scala or use the implementations in the Cats library our books are a good choice. We emphatically do not teach all the language. If you want to know about OO features like self types and trait mixins don't turn to our books.

- Odersky's book has a lot of detail. It does a good job of presenting all of the language but doesn't IMO do a good job of showing you how to use the language.

- FPiS is a very good book that does what the title suggests. My main criticism is it can take a bit long to get to the point and it doesn't talk about libraries you might use in practice like Cats or Scalaz.

- The Coursera courses I have taken are fairly good, but don't do a great job of talking about the higher-level design concepts.

I haven't read other books, so can't comment on them.

Finally, if you don't have a background in formal CS our free book Creative Scala might be useful. The current draft is at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8669329/creative-scala.p... and the source is at https://github.com/underscoreio/creative-scala/

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best resources to properly learn Scala? by pc86 on Monday March 27, 2017 @09:15AM (#13967409)

I'm interested in hearing about your team and diversity discounts, it doesn't look like there is any information on them on the site (unless I missed it!)

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best resources to properly learn Scala? by noelwelsh on Monday March 27, 2017 @10:34AM (#13968018)

Team discount is 20% off for purchases of ten or more copies.

Diversity discount ... I don't think we have a policy for books, but for training we offer 50% off to people who are under-represented in tech and I'm happy to offer the same for books.

Email me (noel at underscore.io) to arrange either.

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best resources to properly learn Scala? by mosqutopi on Monday March 27, 2017 @10:25AM (#13967948)

A very quick glimpse, seconds, at your create-scala book and it there are a lot of figures like in the logo turtle language

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best resources to properly learn Scala? by noelwelsh on Monday March 27, 2017 @10:31AM (#13967996)

Yes, we've taken some inspiration from there, and in Chapter 10 we build a little turtle graphics system.

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best resources to properly learn Scala? by yoyoBee on Tuesday March 28, 2017 @07:35AM (#13975717)

Advanced Scala appears to be just what I'm looking for. According to Gumroad it's in Early Access -- are you able to advise on when you're hoping to publish the final version?

I see from browsing the TOC that some topics are out-of-date (Xor.)

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best resources to properly learn Scala? by noelwelsh on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @11:37AM (#13987288)

In this particular case the TOC is out of date. We released a version of the book compatible with Cats 0.9 (including Either and removing Xor) a few weeks ago.

Final version should be out last half of this year.

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